CHAPTER X
HUNTING  THE  SHAW
the first time I met Shaw was in 1928.    I had just made
arrangements with him and the New York Theatre Guild
to present a repertoire of his plays across Canada each
season, and had come to London to shake hands with him
on the pact.    I had been in Canada to settle the details of
the first trans-continental tour, and the voyage home had
been memorable for me, because we had passed through a
field of icebergs and I had never seen an iceberg before.
My appointment with the great man was rather an early
one, and to have my wits about me when the time came I
had bestirred myself betimes and gone to plunge into the
stately swimming-pool at the Royal Automobile Club before
breakfast.    At that time of day the pool is dim and com-
paratively deserted.    Still half asleep and still feeling the
motion of the ship, I approached the water and was about
to plunge when something made me stop,    I rubbed my
eyes.    There, right in the middle of the pool floated a
diminutive iceberg.    Impossible!    I rubbed my eyes again,
recalling the extremely sober way in which I had spent the
previous evening.    It was still there.    Then, standing no
nonsense, I peered more intently across the darkish water
and finally perceived, of course, that my iceberg was nothing
else than Bernard Shaw's white beard, upturned and glisten-
ing even  in that early morning gloom, the creature's
remaining nine-tenths being submerged in the proper ice-
berg way.    I watched, not seeming to.    The observed of
all observers seemed happy to be off duty, relieved.at the
absence of an audience.    Slowly and easily he swam to the
side and took out of the water the spare, upright body
which had served him then for seventy-two years, and placed
it carefully on dry land.    Then it was that I began to per-
ceive something of the meticulous method, the instinctive
reasoning, which attaches even to his most ordinary and
casual actions.    He did not go at once to his cubicle.
Instead, it was as if he were saying: 'Why wet my very
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